Whose Bill?

I've heard quite a bit today about the defeat in the Senate of "Bush's Immigration Reform Bill." While it's true that President Bush was this reprehensible piece of legislation's biggest cheerleader, it was not, strictly speaking, his bill. First of all, we need to remember that the executive branch cannot legislate, that is up to the legislative branch. Next we need to remember that this bill was written by a confab of Senators, most notably Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who has effectively ended his bid for President with this, and Senator Ted Kennedy (Far left extremist, D-MA). This is not to say that Bush isn't one of the losers in this situation, certainly he threw in his lot with the authors and supporters of this bill and shares in their disgrace. In truth, the disgrace they feel should be from supporting this bill in the first place. I did hear Senator Kennedy saying today that he just doesn't understand why the people wanted to stop this bill from going through, and why they would want to keep the borders open. Well, I'm thinking it's because we were smarter than they gave us credit for and realized that the bill would not have secured the borders as promised. We didn't want to spend billions of dollars on empty promises, while simultaneously granting amnesty to millions upon millions of illegals, and inviting millions upon millions of their family members to come and join them. But maybe that was the point, maybe the whole thing was just a giant stage show so that Congress could say, "Hey, at least we tried" while knowing that when the people learned the truth, they'd never get this monstrous bill to pass. This, of course, is also possible as it plays into the desires of the far left open borders crowd, and leaves them wide open to allow millions more illegals to flood into this country while our lawmakers shrug and talk about how they tried to find a solution, but the stupid American people just wouldn't let them do it. I've also heard it said today that this proves that President Bush is a lame duck President. The term "lame duck" refers to any elected official who has sought re-election and failed, but is still in office until the end of his or her term. Under that, literal, definition, Bush can never be a lame duck, as he can't run for re-election anyway. If, however, you are to use the term to mean someone who has become ineffective in their job, and no longer has the trust of the people to be able to get anything done, then surely it would apply to the congress as well. After all, congress has a lower approval rating than the President, and his is dismal. I guess the thing that gets me the most is that I know how different the coverage would have been if the bill had survived in the Senate (it still would have had to face the house), we would have heard all about how it was such a great victory for Senate Democrats, and they might have mentioned that the President was likely to sign it if it reached his desk, but since it failed, it's all his failure. Give me a break!